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I received my MA in philosophy of science many years ago and currently reviving my academic interests. I hope to stimulate individuals in the realms of science, philosophy and the arts...to provide as much free information as possible.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Lunar mirror to be retired

"Among the project's unlikely achievements has been the discovery that the moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of two-and-a-half inches a year." A significant disclosure. In time the moon will lose its effect on the Earth and will alter Earth's physics.

"After 40 years' reflection, laser moon mirror project is axed"

US research that began with the first Apollo landing - and helped to prove that the moon is moving away from Earth - is to be axed.

by

Robin McKie

June 21st, 2009

The Observer

An experiment, begun when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a mirror on the lunar surface 40 years ago to allow Earth-based astronomers to fire lasers at it, has been ended by American science chiefs.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) last week wrote to scientists working at the McDonald Laser ranging station at Fort Davis in Texas to tell them the annual $125,000 funding for their research project was going be terminated following a review of its scientific merits.

The decision means that four decades of continuous lunar laser research at the McDonald Observatory, run by the University of Texas at Austin, will be halted by the end of this year. Among the project's unlikely achievements has been the discovery that the moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of two-and-a-half inches a year.

The mirror's existence, and the fact that astronomers can bounce lasers off it and detect the returning beam, has also provided Nasa and other scientists with compelling evidence to refute the claims of moon-landing deniers who claim the Apollo lunar mission were hoaxes filmed in an Earth-based studio.

"It is a bitter-sweet feeling to know this is going to come to end at McDonald," said Peter Shelus, head of the laser ranging project. "We have done a great deal of important work using the moon mirrors but it is clearly time for it to end. However, we are hopeful that this work will be continued at other astronomy centres."

The mirror left by Aldrin and Armstrong after they landed on the Sea of Tranquillity on 21 July 1969, was one of five known as "corner mirrors" or "retro-reflector arrays" that were taken to the moon in the later Sixties and early Seventies. Two other corner mirrors were brought to the moon by astronauts on later manned lunar flights, on the Apollo 14 and the Apollo 15 missions. In addition, a second pair were built by French scientists and flown to the moon by the Soviet Union on their robot Luna probes.

Corner mirrors are important scientific instruments because, when struck precisely by a laser beam, they reflect that beam in a parallel path straight back to the source of the laser.

"Essentially, we measure when that beam goes out and when it comes back," said Shelus. "We know the speed of light, of course, so that timing allows us to calculate the moon's distance with incredible precision."

After these laser measurements were amassed for years, calculations by astronomers at the McDonald Observatory showed that as the moon orbits Earth, it creates a bulge of water that travels round the planet behind it. This bulge - which we experience as tides - exerts a gravitational pull on the moon, slowing it down as it circles Earth at a distance of 240,000 miles.

As a consequence of being held back by this pull, the orbit of the moon becomes altered and it moves slowly away from Earth - at a rate of two-and-a-half inches a year. These measurements have, in turn, allowed scientists to carry out valuable tests of theories about relativity and gravity, added Shelus.

A spokesman from the NSF told the Observer last week that, after carrying out two reviews, it had decided there was no longer "a strong science case" for continuing its 40-year support for the lunar laser ranging project. The spokesman added that two other astronomy centres - at Apache Point in Texas and Observatoire de la Côte d'Azure in France - were expected to carry out lunar-ranging experiments in future.

"These are very good centres," said Shelus. "However, it does mean that the continuity of our measurements, which we have established since the Apollo missions, will now have to stop. It is, rather sadly, the end of an era."

1 comment:

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Apollo Landing Sites Pose a Threat to LRO Instrument

July 23, 2009

Written by Nancy Atkinson

The recent images released by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Apollo landing sites are truly remarkable. But there is one instrument on board LRO that must avoid studying some of the the Apollo sites as well as other places where humans have placed spacecraft on the the lunar surface.

The Lunar Orbiting Laser Altimeter (LOLA) pulses a single laser beam down to the surface to create a high-resolution global topographic map of the Moon. However, LOLA is turned off when it passes over the Apollo sites because bouncing the laser off any of the retro-reflective mirrors on experiments left by the astronauts might damage the instrument.

Don Mitchell, who owns a software consulting company and is writing a book on the Soviet Exploration of Venus, wrote about this problem on his blog, saying that if LOLA's beam did strike the retro reflector experiment, "the light bounced back would be 1,000 times the detector damage threshold."

Poet colleague

Annus mirabilis-1905 March is a time of transition winter and spring commence their struggle between moments of ice and mud a robin appears heralding the inevitable life stumbling from its slumber it was in such a period of change in 1905 that the House of Physics would see its Newtonian axioms of an ordered universe collapse into a new frontier where the divisions of time and space matter and energy were to blend as rain and wind in a storm that broke loose within the mind of Albert Einstein where Brownian motion danced seen and unseen, a random walk that became his papers marching through science reshaping the very fabric of the universe we have come to know we all share a common ancestor a star long lost in the eons of memory and yet in that commonality nature demands a permutation a perchance genetic roll of the dice which births a new vision lifting us temporarily from the mystery exposing some of the roots to our existence only to raise a plethora of more questions as did the papers of Einstein in 1905